The Dead

by Charlie Higson

  ‘Maybe they’ve all been eaten,’ said Jack. His helmet already felt heavy on his head and the sword banged against his leg as he walked. ‘They’ve got to eat something.’

  ‘True that,’ said DogNut. ‘Except they prefer fresh meat. The living. Us. But, I mean, think about it, there was bare people in London before. Where’d they all go? It’s too spooky.’

  ‘You want to go back?’ Jack asked.

  ‘No way, soldier. I can’t bust no moves stuck in that museum all day. Nice bundle will be a good way to get some exercise.’ He waved his arms about and took a few practice swipes with the samurai sword he carried.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing with that thing,’ said Jack.

  ‘It’s safe, man. Jordan makes us all do weapons practice. Drilling. But I’m telling you, blood, there’s only so many war games you can play in a day. Don’t try telling Jordan Hordern that, though. He’s nuts about anything to do with war and the military. I reckon he thinks he’s a real general.’

  ‘He seems pretty cold,’ said Jack.

  ‘That’s not the half of it, brother. He’s bonkers, I reckon. He never talks about his old life. Never talks about nothing normal. Just stares at you and yacks on about war and fighting. I reckon he’s some kind of an ick.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know, like he’s autistic, or dyslexic, schizophrenic, alcoholic, something like that. Before all this he was just some sort of war-obsessed loony, now it’s his cold freaky brain that’s kept us all alive, which is why we do whatever he tells us to do. All hail the general!’

  Bam was walking with Ed. He kept glancing up at the sky. Overhead it was still a clear pale blue, but ahead of them, to the south, it looked unnaturally dark.

  He pointed it out to Ed.

  ‘Do you reckon it’s storm clouds?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Ed studied the blackening patch. ‘Can you see a kind of red glow along the bottom?’ he asked after a while. ‘Or am I imagining it?’

  Bam squinted. ‘My eyesight’s not brilliant, to tell you the truth, mate. I should have had an eye test ages ago, but I was too scared.’

  ‘Scared?’ Ed shook his head, smiling. ‘You’re Bam the man. You’re not scared of anything.’

  ‘No word of a lie,’ said Bam. ‘I was a nervous wreck. I thought if I needed glasses I might not be able to play rugger any more. Wouldn’t be able to see the ball.’ He did a mime of someone fumbling to catch a ball, cross-eyed, hands going in all directions.

  Ed laughed. ‘They make special sports contact lenses, don’t they?’ he said. Then checked himself. ‘Or at least they used to.’

  ‘I know, I know, but it’s not the same. Rugger’s a pretty brutal sport. I’d have been worrying all the time.’

  ‘Well, it’s too late to get your eyes tested now.’ Ed chuckled. ‘Let’s hope you don’t go blind.’

  ‘Can you imagine?’ said Bam. ‘Being blind and trying to cope with all this.’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Ed. ‘Some ways it might make it easier. You know, you wouldn’t have to look at their ugly pizza faces for a start.’

  ‘No,’ said Bam. ‘I don’t even want to think about it. That would be just too frightening. Urgh!’

  Ed laughed, but his eyes were firmly fixed on the black sky ahead. ‘I can definitely see what looks like a glow along the bottom,’ he said. ‘Can you not see it at all?’

  Bam turned and bellowed at the girls. ‘Oi! What do you reckon that cloud is, ladies? Can you see a red glow in it at all?’

  Aleisha nodded.

  ‘Red or, like, orange,’ she said. ‘Flickering.’

  Bam sighed. ‘It’s probably a fire then.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘That’s a shed-load of smoke if it is,’ DogNut called from the front.

  ‘Well, there’s no one to put it out, is there?’ said Bam. ‘Look at all these houses, packed right next to each other. There’s so much stuff in them that’ll burn really easily once a fire takes hold. This whole place could go up.’

  ‘Looks a long way off,’ said Ed. ‘I don’t think we need to start panicking just yet.’

  ‘Well, you let us know, won’t you, Ed,’ said Jack, with a slight mocking tone. ‘When we do need to start panicking.’

  ‘Guys?’ Brooke sounded nervous. ‘I think that maybe now’s the time to start panicking.’

  She was pointing down the road. There was a group of sickos ahead, crouching over something that was lying on the ground.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ said DogNut. ‘Fight them or go round?’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Ed. ‘We go round them, obviously. There’s no point fighting if we don’t have to. I mean, it’s not like we can’t go another way, is it?’

  ‘I say we fight them,’ said DogNut. ‘They don’t look much.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Show them who’s boss. Show them we own these streets, blood.’

  ‘No,’ said Bam. ‘Ed’s right. Let’s go round. We should never fight if we don’t have to.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s take the chicken run,’ said Jack.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ed asked, trying not to get angry.

  ‘The Yellow Brick Road. The way the cowardly lion would go.’

  ‘I’m not saying we go round them because I’m scared,’ said Ed. ‘It’s just stupid to get into a fight for no reason.’

  ‘I never said you were scared. I never said anything about you. Why do you assume I’m talking about you all the time? Don’t be so touchy.’ Jack looked round at the others. ‘Did I say that Ed was scared?’

  They shook their heads and shrugged.

  ‘I’m not arguing with you, am I?’ Jack said to Ed. ‘I’m agreeing with you. Let’s go round them. OK?’

  38

  Matt and Archie had found their banner. An old Austrian military standard with a two-headed black eagle on a gold background. They were sitting round a table in the café adapting it. One of Jordan’s boys had directed them to a store cupboard full of paint and brushes and various tools. They’d found some sheeting as well and cut out pieces that they’d glued on to cover the bits they didn’t like. They would have preferred to sew the patches on but didn’t know how. The banner would look pretty scrappy but it would do for now. When they had more time and resources they’d make a new one.

  Matt had done some sketches for the design they were painting on to the bits of sheet. It had taken him a while to get the picture right, but he’d finally drawn one he was happy with. The image was based on his vision. When you looked at it one way, it was a picture of two different boys, one behind the other. Looked at another way it appeared to be a boy and his shadow. The main figure, the boy at the front, was fair-haired and dressed in white. The second boy, his shadow, was dark-haired and wore dark clothing. He was less detailed and looked sort of half-formed. Matt wasn’t the greatest artist in the world, but there was something about his last drawing, a strange, haunting quality.

  Transferring the image to the banner was like a school art project. Matt and Archie and their ten acolytes crowded round the banner, which was draped over the table, the edges dangling down. Matt had sketched in the outline with a big marker pen he’d found in a box in the museum shop and the others were filling in the shapes. They happily chatted away as they mixed the colours and daubed them on, utterly engrossed in their work.

  ‘Red for the eyes!’ said Phil, the youngest of the acolytes. ‘The Shadow Boy should have red eyes.’

  ‘It’s not a poster for a horror film,’ said Matt.

  ‘What colour then?’

  ‘Just leave them dark. And he’s not called the Shadow Boy. He’s the Goat. The shining one is the Lamb; the dark one is the Goat.’

  ‘Should he have horns?’

  ‘No. They’re not a real lamb and a real goat. Just paint him as I’ve drawn him.’

  ‘If we put on yellow rays it’ll look like the Lamb is glowing,’ said Harry, another of the acolytes.r />
  ‘All right. But do it carefully.’

  ‘What’s it going to say?’ Phil asked.

  ‘What do you mean, “say”?’

  ‘It has to have words on it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Something in Latin,’ Harry suggested. ‘Like Death to the enemy.What would that be in Latin? Did anyone here do Latin?’

  ‘I did,’ said Archie. ‘I think Death to the enemy would be something like nex ut hostes hostium, or mors ut hostes hostium, something like that. I’m not really sure.’

  ‘We can’t put something on we’re not sure of,’ said Harry.

  ‘We should put the name of our Lord on it,’ said Matt. ‘The name of the Lamb.’

  ‘That’s an easy one,’ said Archie. ‘That’s Agnus, and Agnus Dei would be Lamb of God, or Lamb of the Lord.’

  ‘That sounds cool,’ said Phil. ‘Agnus Dei.’

  Harry had the best handwriting. He’d done a calligraphy course at school and Matt had been getting him to write down his teachings in a big notebook they’d also scrounged from the shop. They were making their first testament. They’d argued for ages over what to call it. The Book of the Lamb sounded like a recipe book, and The Book of Matt didn’t sound right either. The Book of Matthew sounded too much like the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible, and Matt had gone to great lengths to explain that their new religion had nothing to do with Christianity and any of the old religions, even though he’d nicked most of it from the book of Revelations. In the end they’d decided to just call it The Book, and Harry had carefully drawn the words on the front cover in gothic script. After that he wrote down everything Matt came up with about his new religion. It turned out that Harry’s spelling wasn’t the best in the world, but his writing looked really cool so Matt let him keep his job.

  Harry had tried suggesting that maybe their new religion could have its own special new kind of spelling but the others weren’t convinced.

  Once they’d filled in the two main figures Harry started on the words. But after twenty minutes he was still working on the A so they left him to it, sitting there, hunched over the banner at the table, his tongue between his teeth, a look of intense concentration on his face.

  39

  They had turned off the main road westwards towards the river and had started to weave their way through the tangle of side-streets, occasionally catching glimpses of the gasholders they were using as a landmark. These giant steel drums, painted pale green, towered above the surrounding buildings, but when the kids got in among the tightly packed houses their view of them was blocked.

  There was no clear layout to the streets and the kids had to make detours round housing estates so their progress was slow. They felt really nervous now. There was much more evidence of the disaster on these side-streets, reminders of all that had happened. Fires, wreckage, dead bodies. They also spotted two different roving gangs of sickos and each time had to make another diversion to avoid them, ending up more lost and disorientated.

  At last, though, by pure chance they came out on to a main road and there ahead of them was the blue-and-white Tesco logo on the front of a long, low, ugly building next to the inevitable car park. The gasholders were silhouetted against the sky behind them.

  ‘What did I tell you!’ DogNut cried triumphantly, and the kids cheered as they ran across the road.

  Their excitement was short-lived, however.

  The supermarket had been gutted.

  The windows along the front were all smashed in, the shelves inside stripped clean. A few empty shopping trolleys stood forgotten and lonely among the debris of smashed tills and broken cabinets.

  The kids wandered around glumly, glass crunching underfoot, hoping they might find something that had been missed.

  There was nothing.

  ‘Well, that was a big waste of time,’ said Jack.

  ‘It was worth trying, though,’ said Bam.

  ‘Really? Was it?’

  ‘Come on, Jack, maybe let’s look on the bright side a little, yeah?’

  ‘The bright side of what?’

  ‘Well, at least there weren’t any sickos waiting for us in here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Brooke, and they turned to see her staring along one of the aisles.

  They hurried over to her.

  A skinny mother, her naked arms sticking out like twigs from her sleeveless puffer jacket, was waddling towards Brooke. She was maybe twenty-five, with short, spiky hair and she walked stooped over on bent legs, unable to stand properly. She looked at the kids, her big blue eyes sad and confused, then opened her bloodstained mouth and tried to say something, but only a strangled gargle came out. She coughed and looked embarrassed as a wad of saliva dripped over her lower lip and hung from her chin.

  She started to move towards them, half crawling, half crouching, feeling her way along with her spindly arms out to either side.

  ‘Kill it, Bam,’ said Jack.

  ‘Shoot it,’ DogNut added.

  Bam shook his head. The mother looked so pathetic. ‘Don’t know if I can.’

  Ed stepped forward, rifle raised, the tip of the bayonet pointing at the mother’s face. She looked up at him, her eyes unnaturally large, and shiny, as if she was about to cry. She reminded him of something. For a moment he couldn’t place it and then it came to him. One of those stupid big-eyed characters from a Japanese manga comic.

  He gripped his rifle tighter. Told himself she wasn’t human any more. She was just a mindless thing now, eaten up by disease, probably dying.

  ‘Do it, Ed.’ Jack’s voice sounded hard. Ed knew he didn’t believe he could.

  Could he?

  The thought of sticking the bayonet into her, feeling it sink into her flesh, pushing it hard enough to kill her, into her brain …

  Could he do it?

  Brooke pushed past him and grunted as she swung her club at the back of the mother’s head. The stricken mother collapsed face down with a little whimper and lay still.

  ‘See?’ said Brooke. ‘Told you I wasn’t totally useless. Not like you bunch of wimps. What’s the matter with you all? She was just some stupid sicko. Why can’t you just –’

  Brooke stopped, clapped her hands to her face and ran round the end of the row of cabinets to be noisily sick.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Jack.

  It was dark in the store. The strip lighting that ran in grey ranks along the low ceiling hung down dead and useless. When the kids trooped back outside, the suddenly bright sun caused them to blink and squint and shield their eyes so that it was a few seconds before they spotted a group of sickos tramping towards them across the car park.

  There were about twenty of them, in various stages of decay. The worst were at the back, the slowest, most diseased. They were limping, hunched up, their skin almost totally covered in boils and sores, or else hanging off them in sheets. Their faces were unrecognizable as human, shapeless, raw, bloody and swollen. Noses missing, ears missing, eyes missing, their cheeks either puffed out and swollen, or rotted away, exposing their teeth. Those at the front were the healthier ones, younger, faster and fitter, but still visibly sick, their flesh discoloured and bloated, their bodies ravaged by the poison that was erupting from within.

  At the front, as if he was leading them, was a tall, black-haired father with crazed yellow eyes. He was wearing a long dark coat that flapped in the wind.

  ‘Omigod, it’s Pez!’ Brooke gasped.

  ‘What?’ Jack had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘The one in charge, he looks like one of those Pez sweet-dispenser things. He was there before, at the bus. He must have followed us.’

  Despite everything Jack laughed. She was right. The father’s head was tilting back, leaving his unattached lower jaw dangling and his tongue lolling out over his lower lip. Jack had a strong urge to stand and fight, to stop running and hiding, to hack this human Pez down with his sword. He didn’t want to put the other
s in any danger, though.

  ‘Let’s get away from here!’ he shouted, and they ran.

  They skirted round the supermarket and into an industrial area behind it. They could smell the gas from the towers here; its pungent odour got everywhere. After a couple of minutes of furious, breathless, lung-busting running the kids darted into a sort of yard with garages and lock-ups round the edges and an alley at the back.

  ‘Stop!’ said Bam, looking around. ‘We should be safe here. I’ll check to see they haven’t followed us, but if we stay put for a while they’ll surely give up searching and bugger off.’

  DogNut and Bam went over to the entrance to the yard and looked out.

  ‘No sign of them,’ said DogNut after a while. ‘I reckon we lost them.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ Courtney gasped. The big girl was fighting for breath and she looked pale and scared. Her eyes kept flicking around, not settling on anything. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s too dangerous out here. I think we should go back.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Aleisha. ‘We ain’t gonna find nothing.’

  Then Jack’s voice caused them all to turn round. ‘There’s a lorry in that alleyway.’

  ‘What?’ Ed frowned at him.

  ‘I said there’s a lorry in that alleyway.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So I think it’s a Tesco delivery truck. We should check it out.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Ed put his hands up, palms towards Jack. ‘Call me a coward if you want, but I don’t think that’s a great idea.’

  ‘Why?’ said Jack. ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘It was like this when we were ambushed at The Fez.’

  ‘There’s no one around, Ed.’

  ‘That’s what it was like then. They came from nowhere. They were waiting for us. That lorry could be a trap.’

  Jack laughed. ‘What bloody sickos are going to be able to drive a lorry up an alley and hide it?’

  ‘So why’s it there, then?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ said Jack. ‘I’m just saying we should have a look.’